Un-joined-up government: intergovernmental relations and citizenship rights

While there are obvious connections between devolution in general and citizenship rights, the relationship between intergovernmental relations and citizenship rights is not immediately evident. At least between 1999 and 2007, intergovernmental relations were a relatively obscure and technical aspect of the working of devolution in the United Kingdom (as it is in many federal systems), more suited to discussions of the practicalities of public administration than to issues of principle like citizenship rights, or the macro-level discussions of the working of welfare states that often accompany them. However, this chapter will argue that the two are connected; that the UK's approach to intergovernmental relations helps to explain the disjointed approach to citizenship rights that has manifested itself since devolution and reinforces such a trend. This chapter will look at two aspects of intergovernmental relations. First, there is the division of powers between the UK parliament and government and the devolved institutions of Scotland, Wales and (intermittently) Northern Ireland. Second, there is the nature of those relations – the substance of negotiations and agreements reached between governments, how the substantive relationship changes over time, and the processes by which those governments involved deal with each other. This approach has a long pedigree in understanding the working of federal systems (see, for example, Watts, 1989, for comparative discussion; Simeon, Richard, 2006b, or Stevenson, 2005, for Canada; Galligan et al, 1991, for Australia; or Jeffery, 1999, for Germany), which can also be applied to the very different conditions of the UK (as in Trench, 2007). (It has been used, although with less success, in understanding relations between central and local government in the UK; see Rhodes, 1988, for a discussion.) Such relations are particularly important for states undergoing a process of decentralisation or devolution, because of the often-limited powers available to constituent unit governments in such systems and the dynamic nature of the process of constitutional change (Agranoff, 2004). In this context, the UK is rather unusual, as unlike most welfare states in federal or decentralised systems (such as those discussed in Obinger et al, 2005), it is decentralising a welfare state that has already been built around the institutional framework of a unitary or union state, rather than building its welfare state to take account of a division of powers between federal and state governments.

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